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Record W4409790709 · doi:10.1080/13698230.2025.2496599

How should we do political theory? Reading Rawls on method

2025· article· en· W4409790709 on OpenAlex
Loren King

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical Philosophy and Ethics
Canadian institutionsWilfrid Laurier University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPoliticsReading (process)EpistemologyPrimary goodsReflective equilibriumSociologyPolitical philosophyLaw and economicsPositive economicsPhilosophyPolitical scienceLawEconomicsEconomic Justice

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Consider a seemingly fruitful ordering of our intellectual labours: think in ideal terms about justice and legitimacy, then bring our ideas and arguments to bear upon messy (and very much nonideal) real-world complications. This ordering is most often associated with John Rawls, but this was not his actual practice. That is no vice: Rawls took wide reflective equilibrium seriously as a philosophical method, moving back and forth from ideal to nonideal considerations in ways that belie the usefulness of any priority claims. We do not gain much insight by asserting the priority of either ideal or nonideal theorizing. Indeed, we could stop using those terms altogether, and theory might be none the worse, if we embrace something like Rawls’ constructivist method. Normative political theory should, then, reject certain methodological conceits lurking in some of the philosophical work we otherwise embrace.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.022
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.929
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.022
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.138
GPT teacher head0.473
Teacher spread0.335 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it